Brigandine is a for the, created by developer and released in 1998. An American port, called Brigandine: The Legend of Forsena, was released in the same year. In 2000, Hearty Robin released a remake of the game called Brigandine: Grand Edition, which included support, along other new features. In the game, the player chooses one of the nations of the fictional continent of Forsena, and has the goal of conquering the other nations by taking their castles, using troops composed by human commanders and fictional creatures.

Although primarily a turn-based strategy game, the game includes some characteristics of. In Brigandine, the player controls one of the six playable nations. Each nation possess a number of troops and castles. Each troop is composed by a human leader, called rune knight, and fictional creatures such as, and, which are called 'monsters'.

The goal of the player is to conquer the entire continent by attacking the enemy castles with the controlled nation's troops (or troops from allied nations). Likewise, troops are also used to protect the controlled nation's castles from enemy troops' attacks. Brigandine features two gameplay modes, both turn-based: a preparation mode and a battle mode.

Rune knights and monsters have statistics typical of, such as,, attack, defense,, and like. Rune knights also have, and may switch between classes if some conditions are met. Monsters don't have classes, but may be upgraded to more powerful forms, called promotions, when they have a minimum level or some special items are used.

The number of monsters which may join a troop is limited by the rune knight's rune power statistic. The entire nation has a leader, called ruler, which is a rune knight with a unique class, but otherwise similar to other rune knights. In this mode, each turn is represented by a in-game 'month'. The player may navigate and view statistics of all castles of the continent (although only the castles of the player's nation may be managed).

Each month has an organize phase and an attack phase. In the organize phase, the player may re-allocate troops between castles, re-allocate monsters between troops, summon new monsters, equip and use items, change rune knights' classes and promote monsters. The player may also send rune knights to quests. To summon additional monsters, a certain amount of must be spent. Each nations acquires an income of mana on the beginning of each turn. The amount of mana depends on the number of the castles belonging to the nation.

Monsters also have an upkeep cost; they consume an amount of mana every turn. Because of this, there is an option of deleting monsters. Quest is not quite a gameplay mode, since they are not playable; they make the rune knight (and its troop) unavailable for a variable amount of turns. During this time, the character is involved in events (mostly random), which may benefit or impair the player. Rulers cannot participate on quests. In the attack phase, each nation may allocate its own troops to adjacent enemy castles, which is treated as an attack. If the defending castle is occupied, a battle is marked to occur between the two groups of troops, unless the castle originating the troops is attacked first (the order of attack depends on the level of the rune knights).